Titanfall review

EVER SINCE ITS RELEASETitanfall has been one of the most anticipated Xbox One game titles. There are plenty of reasons for this, not least the fact it was built by Respawn Entertainment studios. For those who don't know, Respawn is the brainchild of Jason West and Vince Zampella, who formerly were responsible for development of the Call of Duty franchise at Infinity Ward.

Titanfall borrows elements of the Call of Duty gunfighting gameplay West and Zampella helped create and pushes it to the next level, adding a SciFi setting complete with giant battling mechs. Interestingly, unlike most shooters, outside of a very short training mode, there is no single player gaming in Titanfall. Instead Titanfall is purely multiplayer, which means you will need an Xbox Live gold membership to play all the modes.

The game is split into separate Campaign and Classic gameplay sessions. The Campaign mode is the only part of Titanfall with a semblance of a story and sees you fight through individually crafted multiplayer games that chronicle the war between the Militia and IMC factions. The Classic mode is a matchmaking mode that lets you set up or join six on six multiplayer matches.

The Campaign mode matches see you start off playing as the Militia before replaying the same set of nine missions from the perspective of the IMC. Both modes see you take the role of a pilot. Pilots are elite soldiers in the war that get access to advanced giant robotic fighting mech suits, known as Titans.

Jumping into the Campaign mode, we found that the missions on offer included basic Attrition and Hardpoint objectives. Attrition is Titanfall's deathmatch mode and simply tasks your team to reach a preset kill count level before your enemy to win. Hardpoint is Titanfall's equivalent of King of the Hill, and requires you to capture and control key points of the map for a certain amount of time to win.

The Classic mode features a more robust set of match options and adds Last Titan Standing, Capture the Flag and Pilot hunter modes to the basic Attrition and Hardpoint games. Last Titan Standing sees every player enter the game in their Titan with only one life. The game tasks you to kill all enemy Titans. Capture the Flag is a basic mode that challenges you to steal your enemy's flag and bring it back to your home base. Pilot Kill is a tweaked version of Attrition where only pilot kills count towards your team's score.

Playing in Campaign mode we picked up very few details about Titanfall's main story. The only information we got is that the conflict - which is between the local inhabitants of human colonies, who are represented by the Militia, and IMC - revolves around how the central human government is treating distant world citizens. This is because the campaign has only a few bare cut scenes explaining the story and most of it is told through video chat feeds that appear in the top right of your screen during gameplay. This makes them difficult to follow as they generally appear when you're in the midst of combat and are focused on surviving your enemies' onslaught.

While some gamers will be disappointed with this, considering Titanfall's multiplayer focus we didn't find it too much of an issue. This is because, from the moment we jumped into our first Titanfall mission, we found ourselves wholly engrossed with its gameplay.